The Moment You Tweet Or Take An Instagram Photo, LocalResponse Helps Relevant Advertisers Find You

If advertisers are going to show up in our social media feeds,
they may as well show us things we've expressed interest in.

That's what ad guy and angel investor Nihal Mehta figured when he
founded LocalResponse
in June 2011. A year and a half later, his social media ad
targeting company is doing very well.

LocalResponse helps advertisers scour more than 30 million social
media profiles on the web and in mobile apps. It looks for
mentions of brands in real-time and sifts through tweets,
Instagram photos, Foursquare check-ins and Facebook status messages to help companies
place relevant, timely ads by matching socialID to cookies on
desktops, or unique identifiers/ifa on mobile devices.

For example, if a user tweets "just went for a run,"
LocalResponse sees the cookie in an ad exchange like AppNexus, bids on that impression, and displays
a Nike ad to that same user on another website.

Its revenue is growing too. Local Response's president Kathy
Leake says 2012 revenue has increased 10X from last year.

LocalResponse also says it's adding three big names to its board:
Satya Patel, formerly of Google, Battery Ventures and Twitter, Nat Turner, the InviteMedia co-founder
who sold his business to Google for a lot of cash, and Tobias
Petts, formerly of Walmart.

LocalResponse now has 30 employees, and it has raised more than
$5 million. The company says it expects its social media profile
reach to increase 50% next year.